5 people found this review helpful
Recommended
6.6 hrs last two weeks / 6.6 hrs on record (2.6 hrs at review time)
Posted: Mar 9 @ 3:39pm

As someone who has played the game since release - albeit with a bit of offtime inbetween - here is my overall review about the game and the PC port in particular.

First of all the game in general.
This is a gacha. The monetanization is horrendous. Everything is expensive. And if you want to give the Devs a little bit of money, some of the best options start at 23+€. The battle passes, which there are many of, are most of the time imo not worth it. I bought a single one so far which I thought had some value. The rates for characters are rather high though, with 5% for legendary adventurers.

The game has a stamina system, but it is character specific. Every character except the main character has fortitude. This lowers when characters die, run into traps or from some enemy attacks. What's the catch? When a characters dies you can revive them with a small mini game. Just hit the circle at the right moment. When the fortitude lowers the circle gets smaller until its a 1 pixel small dot. Also, dead characters can be revived at the church, but when their fortitude is low (below 50) they might turn into ash and are permanently gone. Yep, this is a gacha with perma death.

There are other mobile like mechanics, like random stats on equipment (which is farmable with very few gacha only things) or leveling skills by foddering off duplicate characters into other characters.

With that being said: Most of that is completely irrelevant. Because at its core, this is just an oldschool dungeon crawler. It's a dungeon crawler first and a gacha second.

The game won't be for everyone, with its obstuse mechanics, brutal difficulty, mean traps and grindy gameplay. But do you actually need to pull for the new, shiny characters? Not really. When you pull a character they get random bonus stats. This can lead to your shiny legendary characters having lower stats at level 1 than no name characters. The only difference so far for Legendary characters is that they have an additional skill and/or passive effect. But you don't need them. A balanced party can traverse the dungeon just fine. My current main party has 3 legendary characters and 2 normal characters (named adventurers) as well as MC. This totally works. You may want to level up a second and later third party though, due to elemental affinitied and to circumvent the stamina system.

Overall, I totally fell in love with the game. The gameplay is addicting and just fun if you have at least some treshhold for mild annoyances and sometimes brutal difficulty spikes.

However, the game is pretty buggy. When the game first released, there were many game breaking bugs. Most of them have been fixed, but there are still bugs here and there. The devs are hard at work but have a rather small team, so it may take some time. Maybe just wait another month or 2 before you try it. The game is definitly worth it.

And now, the PC version in particular.
In typical Wizardry Variants Daphne fashion, this PC port is a mess. It's bare bones. Essentially, it's just the mobile game with better performance and a bigger field of view. It lacks basics things other Gacha games and especially PC games provide.
  • As of writing this review, still no way to change the spoken language to anything else without changing the games language.
  • No way to save your account unless you use the ID and password the game provides. No Steam Account, not Google Account, not other way to save.
  • Barely any options, especially in terms of graphics.
  • No way to rebind keys - and I would kill for the ability to switch Q and A as well as E and D for change direction/strafe.
  • As far as I know, even if you want to use a controller you still need the mouse at some points.
  • The PC version brought some new bugs, like the world map not triggering your inputs. I had to click like 10 times on a town to finally enter it, which works without problems on the mobile version.
  • And the big one: The game automatically installs files post steam installation on C in a folder you can't change! It doesn't really concern me, but this is a gross oversight and really needs fixing.

Overall, I still recommend the game, mainly for its great gameplay and the fact that the mobile version still has issues (it runs like ♥♥♥♥ and has graphic glitches in some areas which are not present on my PC for example). So it's not like the PC version is much worse than the mobile version - it's just not really better.

If you itch for a dark fantasy dungeon crawler (gacha!) game, which has a high difficulty and may make you curse a few more ofthen than you'd like to admit, then look no further and download the game! It's free after all - just be aware that the game has bugs. But hey, they might get fixed sooner or later, eh?
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1 Comments
Gala Mar 10 @ 10:59am 
Cool!